A behind-the-scenes look into how fast food is prepared

I once took pride in my fast-food gorging capabilities.

Double cheeseburgers, Whoppers,… I once took pride in my fast-food gorging capabilities.

Double cheeseburgers, Whoppers, fries and milkshakes – I loved it all. Around January of this year during lunch with a friend, he pointed to my burger when I was almost finished and asked if I realized I had gotten a double Whopper. I’d eaten two huge patties of greasy meat and hadn’t even noticed.

That’s when I realized the severity of my grossness. I didn’t care how the cow ended up between my sesame seed buns, just as long as it got there and it wasn’t still mooing when I took that first savory bite.

But I wasn’t always so desensitized to the fact that fast food is taking over the world. When I arrived at Pitt my freshman year, I read “Fast Food Nation” by Eric Schlosser for my Seminar in Composition class. I vowed that I would never touch another McDonald’s devil meal again.

And believe it or not, I didn’t for about a year.

I spent that year spreading my gospel about the vaguely defined “chicken parts” used in chicken nuggets, the “just-add-water-to-make-any-meat” conspiracy at Taco Bell and the shady health standards surrounding food preparation practices. But nobody seemed to care.

It didn’t seem to affect anyone else in class nearly as much as it did me. Maybe I was the only dork that actually read the book. I was shocked to discover that the meat-packing industry is now the most dangerous job in America because of the incredible demands placed on workers to supply fast food companies with ground beef.

Just imagine the cleanliness of a factory in which workers don’t even have time to get a sharpened blade and are cutting their limbs with dull knives in their rush to meet quotas. And there’s always the threat of E. coli contaminating your burger from these same unhealthy conditions.

But fast food is such a natural part of everyday life that we hear these frightening tidbits of information and simply discard them, not fully weighing the impact that this eating style has on our health. Well, just in case you were forgetting, here are some scary stories from www.petakids.com that should make you think twice before ordering away.

A Virginia family discovered a special treat in their chicken wings – a fried chicken head complete with eyeballs and crispy beak. No worries. The health inspector addressed the problem:

“Even the beak will simply crunch apart in your mouth.”

A family in Canada found a rat head on its daughter’s burger with its cute little facial features and whiskers still intact. And yet another American family was enjoying a bucket of fast-food cuisine when the young daughter asked her mother what was crawling out of her mouth. Upon closer inspection of the food, they discovered that it was infested with maggots.

As if these surprises aren’t embarrassing enough for the fast food chains, imagine their excitement when they are made aware of employee scandals when they’re also brought to the nation’s attention. Like in New York, when an employee referred to as “Burger Boy” admitted to spraying oven cleaner on several hamburger patties and then serving them to a customer who subsequently became very ill.

Maybe this People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals Web site directed at children is just trying to scare the heck out of little kids, though. It goes on to detail employees urinating on burgers and then serving them as well. My hope is that since fast food joints are so busy, most employees don’t have time to formulate, much less act on, such disgusting thoughts.

So how about this new promotion McDonald’s has going on? Commercials boast that customers will receive a plastic Arch card loaded with a dollar that they can use towards their next McDonald’s purchase. An excellent stocking stuffer that can be reloaded with $5, $10, $25 and $50 denominations and be used at any of the more than 13,000 McDonald’s in the United States. Happy Heart Attack, Uncle Bob.

Hundreds of millions of people buy fast food every single day. As a result, our nation has more people behind bars than farming in fields. So next time you’re hungry for something quick, grab an apple and nix the greasy burger. As the old adage goes – “You are what you eat.”

Jessica only has beef with the meat-packing industry. E-mail her your concerns at jrp32@pitt.edu.